Maybe there's a G-Grrl who emerged from the mushroom cloud to offer Alyx a no-choice too. 'Cept in the 'tween times, instead of Alyx going into stasis, the gals have a slumber party and gossip about the G-Man and Gordon.

I think the surprise will be something out of the classic Philip K. Dick novel, UBIK:

Jump in the urinalAnd stand on your headValve is aliveAnd we are all dead!

I mean, think about it, half-life in the novel was a frozen existence as the brain stem slowly died, maybe Valve and sTeam are ways for this corporation to thaw us out and give us new life, but as corporate zombie slaves, or something.

I mean, if you have enough chewing gum, rubber bands, and the foil from your chewing gum, you should be able to connect the goddamned dots.

I mean, if I'm alive right now, where is my body?

Do you see it anywhere? Where does this voice come from? Where do any of our voices come from?

Why do we need to connect to sTeam for single player? Maybe they're using our frozen minds as some sort of super processor, all linked together to support some common reality but if you refuse to let sTeam connect, it doesn't have the same kick.

Hey, just be glad that MapleBob idiot isn't in here spewing his random collection of words for us all to read. lol This guy wears tin foil helmets because STEAM is going to take over the world with spyware some day.

When it comes to music, people should only listen to whatever comes in over their fillings.

Did you know that when you die and go to Heaven, that's all they judge you on up there.

Like "Yo! Dude, what did you listen to to earn those scrawny wings."

And yada, yada, yada. For all eternity.

In this respect, Hell is so much better. For one thing, everyone who ends up there pretty much expected to end up there anyway. And the admins pretty much expect everyone there belongs there too.

In Heaven the admins are always second guessing their decison to let someone in. If they find out your favorite song for a while was What's Going On? or Little Miss Can't Wrong and splish splash, you're taking a Hell bath no matter how your taste may have matured later on.

They consider it a EULA violation of the brain you were given, pretty much for free.

The future implications are all around us. What scares me is a right-wing country that is so brainwashed by the corporate right-wing owned media, that all these statistics on what is bought could swing more people to the right extremism of our society because of marketing to the statistics and thus flood the market with subversive conservatism. Fear and propaghanda creates that staple of American society: fear, consume and hate.

Hahahahaha!

And they call me delusional. Fear and propaganda are all the Left has in its arsenal. LOL!!!!!

I mean, sTeam is just the type of thing the lefties love, being autocratic and right about everything from gun control to Global Warming(TM) to spotted owls.

Be honest, wouldn't you love to be in charge of a water empire so you could starve the red states into submission? Or better yet, oblivion!!!! That's what the enviro-wacktovist movement is about at the heart of it.

LOL!

It is so funny, with the prevalence and relative affordability of mirrors these days that so few people bother taking a close look and the face looking back out at them. Most people have no earthly idea of who or what they are.

Everyone in their peer group agrees with them up and down the line and, what do they think about themselves? That they're original thinkers! Thinking out of some box they don't even know the parameters of! And more, they delude themselves into thinking they are being open minded! LOLOLOLOL! And, and this is the clincher, that being Open Minded is a good thing. LOLOLOLOLOL

Let me tell you, the more open minded you think you are, the more likely it is that Something had taken up residence behind your eyes and has taken over the responsibility of thinking for you. All the while patting you on the back for being such an open minded and free thinker.

People willing accept trojans and viruses into their minds that they would never allow on their PC's

YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO PLAY HL2. You can only play it under Valve's conditions.

Well, Valve is quick enough to take everybody's money. Maybe they should make buying the game Invitation Only if they hate their customers so much?

then they can exclude who they wish before any money changes hands. No Jews, no blacks, no WASPs, no fat chicks, only (or unless they are) survivors of Jonestown and the Applewhite cult. And if they are survivors of both, oh God! That would be a juicy treat for Valvians everywhere!

Obedient, docile, slavish in their devotion to all that is Valve! Gabe Newell's wet dream!

'Cause, you know, had I known Valve held me in such contempt, I never would have pre-ordered the game all that time ago. I expect the fanboyz to be jerks, which is why I don't participate in online play.

Have you ever heard of the interconnectness of all things? Pretty much anything you can talk about is the same thing as everything else because the only thing we can really talk about is the Primal Urge which led the Nothing to become Something, and hence, here we are.

Also, no matter what you think your favorite color is, you're probably wrong because any condition that can exist does exist. So over in Universe 13, your favorite color is yellow, but two Universes over, your favorite color is teal.

Most terrorism can't be fought by taking away civil rights or anything, totally ineffective. But the fact that it happens gives some people a sense of security (something is being done!) ... others get mad about it.

Well, so far, nobody's civil rights were taken away in the war on terror, 'cept maybe some terrorists.

But to fight this war properly, the first thing we should have done on 9/12/2001 is to nuke Mecca.

If they're still coming after that, you target the second most holy site in all of Islam, and so on and so on.

The war on terror is largely a war of symbolism for them. They thought taking down the !! twin towers would destroy our virilty, our potency, but all it did was was wake about 51% of the population up. And for now, that's good enough.

But believe me, this, you take away their symbols and they fold like a house of cards. Like bees without a queen.

"But it's not fair, other people are playing," yeah, by following the company's rules.

I'm sure this sounds good on paper, but I'll bet if analyzed, it would turn out that a proportionatly higher percentage of the 20,000 live in Broward County FL then anywhere else on earth. Except maybe France.

I mean, people who can't figure out how to poke a hole in a bit of paper sure as heck aren't going to be able to install h-l 2 and so they need special help.

Valve should immeadiatly dispatch its sTeam shock troops to the area!

Okay, on a serious note, I think the whole point of Valve and sTeam and Half-Life 2 is to search out and destroy the real Gordon Freeman, being that he is the only one who can stop them.

What better way to try to locate and nutralize him? The one person who can destroy Valve and all that Gabe Newell has worked for?

Obviously, some sort of mind control is at work with sTeam and H-L2 and this Freeman, whoever his is, has vowed to stop it. But every second delayed means Valve's army of crazed zombie fanboyz grows and grows.

Maybe the delay of the game last years was Freeman's doing?

I mean City 17 is so obviously Valve nd their logo with valves inserted into various places in the head, the mind, to control the mind. I think the splash screen has the valve in the eye, because they wan't to control all you see. Then there's another one with the valve in the back of the head somewhere, a symbol that they can open your mind and crawl inside anytime it pleases them.

The real life Freeman is probably Gabe Newell's good twin.

Maybe Gabe himself was at one time the "good twin" and he was undercover at MS when Bill Gates "got to him" and as punishment, sent him off to start Vavle where the only game he can make over and over is the story of his attempt to stop MS and the gray man is Bill Gates!!!!!!!!

Maybe if Valve is so afraid of being ripped off, they should work on the games but just not release them.

Maybe, under special guard, they can let a member of the game press in to see what we could all be playing if there were no pirates.

Or maybe, they should only release their games to people already in prison, people who are used to being treated like criminals. Because they are!

And Valve could impose special rules about the prisoners being shackled to the mouse at all times during play. And when they aren't playing, they have to keep their eyes totally shut, in case any of the game leaks out of their brain and back out their eye sockets.

Or, they could just make the game and give it to the warez community. That would really piss the warezers off, as well as us normal paying customers.

I always say: If you're going to alienate someone anyway, it might as well be everybody.